The doctor looked at me with an air of disdain about himself as he went to the fridge to grab a couple of beers from the fridge. One of them he tossed to me, which I barely was able to catch in my shaking hands. The other he opened for himself and then tossed me the bottle opener.
“You know,” he said, taking a swig, “You can’t really expect me to believe you.”
“I don’t,” I said, too dejected to even open my own beer, “but I can’t figure out who else to tell.”
“The police?” He was now playing with the bottle cap on the kitchen counter.
“For what, exactly?” I said, “It’s not like I have any physical proof that she’s doing anything, and to be honest, I think you’re the only one I have any shoot with getting taken seriously.”
Dr. Frederick groaned a bit and started rubbing his temples, clearly not in the mood to deal with the ramblings of a man he believed to be having a delusional psychotic breakdown. He put his beer down (though not before taking another drink) and said to me, “Okay, okay, let’s start this again, and explain to me as clearly as possible just what you think is going on.”
The way he ended his sentence so accusingly at me made me embarrassed, almost too much so to repeat my story, but I couldn’t exactly back out now so I just began with a deep breath.
“Over the past couple of months there’s been—a lot of dying going on around this place.”
“I can agree that we’ve lost quite a few people in this town, but keep in mind that most of those were heart attacks, in men well over fifty, no less. Not exactly a suspicious trend. Their time had just come.”
That last phrase made my stomach churn a little bit. I replied, “There were also accidents.”
He nodded, “Yes. Unfortunately we did lose a few students, very good students, in a car accident a while back, but I’m afraid that’s just chalked up as another DWI casualty, much as I hate to sound like I’m dismissing it as a statistic. And as for Jodie…”
“Dear God, Jodie,” I moaned and slumped over the counter.
“Jodie was tragic, horrible, but also a freak accident. That’s it, an accident. No one at fault, no one to blame, no one to get angry at.”
“But they all happened in the same two months. Ah, forget it. I’ll just get on with it.” Another deep breath and I continued, “Have I ever told you what I heard—when I found Jodie’s body?” He shook his head. “Well, I didn’t remember it, or maybe didn’t realize I’d heard it, until a few weeks later, when I overheard Mr. Sherman’s widow, not even a week after his heart attack, talking about finding him. And you know what she said? Can you even guess? She said that as soon as she walked in and found him in their bedroom, she heard singing. Very faint, but definitely a woman singing just outside the window, but when she ran to the window to try and get her to help, there wasn’t anyone there.”
“How could there?” Dr. Frederick asked, “Isn’t their room on the second story?”
“That’s exactly what was throwing her off too,” I continued, “She brushed it off as just being an old woman starting to hear things. I mean, Lord knows her hearing hasn’t been quite right for a while, but it still got me thinking, got an idea screwing itself in my head. Then, a couple of days later, I realized: I had also heard it. When I found Jodie, I had also heard a woman singing faintly. I just didn’t register it at the time over all—,” I had to swallow, “ over all the other noise, but it was there! It was there! And once more, I thought I’d ask around about the others, see if anyone else had heard it, and you know what? There was. If they found the bodies soon enough, it seems, they could also hear singing. A couple of the other widows did, and one of the first responders at the car accident that killed those kids says he recalls hearing it too!”
